


To Be Alone (With You)

by violenteer



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Tony's still super smart, And can still make a suit, Because he needs protection, God bless him, M/M, What is Bruce doing? Does anyone know
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-07 21:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4277769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violenteer/pseuds/violenteer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony plays the part of a lonely self-sustained genius. Bruce plays this same part, only a little differently. Pandemonium ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to Brittany
> 
> Without her, there would be nothing to read.

 Everything is dark. A few minutes ago, JARVIS sounded alarmed – like he knew something was going to happen. Like he knew Tony’d be up shit creek, although how could he? How could anyone?

 Tony was supposed to be somewhere they hadn’t found out about.

 The world around him is shifting too fast. Trying to make up for the lost productivity of man, maybe? No. That doesn’t actually make sense. That’s irrational.

 His suit’s system is offline, so he can’t calibrate it to general settings. To put it in simpler terms, Stark can’t get the fuck out of this gutter. But he can move, he knows he can move. The mechanic didn’t sustain any injuries that would take him outta the game; he’s not incapable of saving himself.

 It’s not even hard for Tony to find a reason to get up, because he saw that guy – that curly-haired son of a bitch squatting behind a dilapidated park bench. He’s Tony’s reason to stand, and he can’t be far. Right? _Right?_

 He doesn’t know.

 Tony smacks the left arm of his suit twice, gruff, trying to reactivate the internalized generator, maybe get a little bit of light going. It’s dark out, and the only sounds to hear for miles are the monotonous groans of countless corpses, all looking for their next meal.

 Luckily, the brunet’s armor seals the… live scent of himself off from the rest of the world. He can’t be seen, can’t be smelled, can’t be bitten into like Sunday dinner.

 It works out. Really.

 Seconds of semi-silence drift past. Something steps on the back of his suit’s thigh. He thinks of shifting up and putting down whatever’s walking the Earth now to stop from accruing another dent in the suit, but… now’s not the time for manifested rage.

  _Manifested rage._ Tony hasn’t thought of that term in a while, now. Not since one of many psychiatrists his father hired labeled him with it, told him that his ‘bouts of scientific breakthrough’ were… episodes. Emotional episodes. What a quack, right?

  _Ouch._ Another foot, another part of the suit. _That hurt._ The metal made a screeching sound. Tony hopes none of the undead got any ideas to stick around. Screeching metal isn’t human… they have no reason to keep thinking about it.

 Or, whatever they do. Not think. Feel? He doubts it. However zombies work through observations, they shouldn’t focus on Stark.

 Still, is it just him, or are their noises growing louder? Is he paranoid? Is it just that? Maybe it is. Fucking maybe it is. Tony has a lot of reasons to be paranoid in this goddamn wasteland, and now his protective, bodily shield is betraying him with stupid sound.

 Can that guy hear Tony, now? Hear the things around him? All of these freak-shows that want a good piece of meat to occupy them? Maybe he can.

 “Sir, you are not in an ideal position.”

 Thank fuck. JARVIS.

 In an instant, the street beneath and ahead of Tony glows with intelligence signatures that are displayed on the inside of his suit’s faceplate. Each signature tells the man something different. How close he is to home, or to the end of his battery’s life cycle. What the main roads look like. Radio stations that channel emergency transmissions or personal messages of distress, of help. Hope.

 Things like that.

 “JARVIS, good to hear from you. Want to tell me what’s going on?” his voice, unlike his scent, is unfortunately broadcast through the suit.

 Which means, every zombie in the vicinity heard Tony. So, living human anomaly close to him or not, he can’t stay here.

 “You were headed toward a discontinued power plant, sir. You are within one-point-five miles of the plant, now.” The AI’s robotic voice informs, not emotionlessly.

 “Okay. Meaning?”

 “The non-living around this area are mutated. Any move they make toward your suit now will be much more effective than if they were to find you in daylight.”

 Tony’s not completely sure what JARVIS is getting at at this point, but he doesn’t care. He can’t. JARVIS is Tony’s copilot, and he’s the only thing that keeps the mechanic from drinking a lot of good whiskey and taking the final nap. So, he moves. Stands up, stands tall, tries to walk through the bodies that are now swarming him.

 Sound and movement are what attracts the corpses most, and he’s just given them a decent spectacle.

 “They appear to be superhuman, sir.” JARVIS continues. “Although, they move past Dr. Banner without noticing him.”

 “Dr. Banner?” Tony asks, swinging either of the hands of his suit to deter encroaching adversaries.

 He’s almost out of the alleyway, and he can see a few stragglers from here on out. Nothing as massive as what he’s leaving behind. God, they smell. All of them smell like dried blood and decay, their limbs falling off of them, their faces crusted over with what Tony can only assume is… someone. Whatever person they found and made a snack out of.

 He will hand it to the zombies, they’re great searchers. Tony himself couldn’t find another living soul until this week, and even that’s a precarious thing. The guy isn’t _seen_ by these things. The only thing he does (from the camera feeds Stark’s posted up almost everywhere) is move past them.

 Sometimes he looks like he’s yelling, but the undead don’t try to get at him. Not even then. He pisses Tony off, because the genius is pretty sure he’s slipping over the edge, and that stranger’s in his imagination.

 He hopes not. Of course. But Stark likes to think logically. And a living and breathing human being walking all over town without marks to show for it is… a little crazy.

 Maybe that’s what JARVIS is referencing to.

 “You mean the guy from the park? From Central Park?”

 “Yes. He will be to your immediate right in 500 feet.”

 Zombies wail around Tony, hang onto him, ask him with their putrid breath how it would feel to be something to eat, for them. Their opened jaws gnash and clang around the solid metallic casing of his suit. It’s not like he hasn’t been here, before. But, with the introduction of this new guy, maybe Tony hasn’t.

 He needs to get to the other. To Dr. Banner.

 And Tony will, just as soon as he gets himself out of this cluster-fuck of fifty-against-one.

 But hey, it’s just a day in the life, right?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter: Bruce Banner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am sorry that this took such a long time to anyone that was interested!

Bruce spent a lot of his time thumbing the dead keys of his phone in his pocket. It’d been out of use since the very beginning of the virus, but he kept it with him. Whenever the scientist could, he would charge it, and he’d listen to a voicemail his girlfriend Betty had sent him. It was a simple one; she was worried about him. She said she hadn’t seen him in far too long, and that she wondered if he was still alive. Her voice told him that he must be, because his number still worked. Bruce didn’t know why, but that part always made him very sad.

 

He knew he’d never be able to be around when Betty needed him and when she’d sent that voicemail, it was a clear reminder. At the end of it, she whispered that she missed him like a limb. Bruce never believed that. He believed everything else, because he and Betty were close, and they’d shared too many experiences for the entire message to be a lie. But he knew she didn’t miss him. And now? She was probably incapable, being dead and all.

 

Sitting on his ass right beside a bench, Bruce watched a crowd of undead hurry toward something. They were slow for the most part, but when something got their attention, they ran. It was usually a sickening sight to behold – watching a parade of corpses skitter across flesh-colored pavement. Bruce couldn’t think about it, though. He couldn’t think about it because he knew what they were going after; he’d seen the Iron Man suit fly past him some hours ago. Bruce was wandering past old and broken storefronts on Fifth Avenue when it happened. The pass-by was fast.

 

Iron Man stopped, but not for long. Bruce knew his routine. He did a full perimeter sweep of New York City – each Borough – and then he’d fly back to Stark tower. Bruce watched the bot sometimes, and he was usually glad to. There was a constant in his life beside the putrefied populace. It was a departure from the norm, even if he was sure that bot was empty. Tony Stark might be alive, but he wouldn’t be dumb enough to sweep New York himself. He’d send the bot out remotely, and after making sure that there was no great gathering of living souls, he’d send Iron Man home, to the beacon, Stark Tower.

 

That was another interesting thing, Stark Tower. It blazed in full electrical majesty, having been disconnected from the public grid a long time ago. Bruce Banner read about that in a local newspaper before one of his treatments. Although he usually only remembered searing pain when he left STANE facilities, that headline stuck with him. _Stark’s clean energy initiative – so far privatized – to hit the ground_ running _with intergalactic support!_ Yeah, the Avengers knew how to make an entrance in the world. Especially Tony.

 

Bruce had followed Tony Stark’s career for some time before that, but he was never more interested than when he was gathering information about the billionaire’s emergence from weapons manufacture to clean energy. It was like a scientific dream come true – if science had ever been aware of what Bruce aspired for.

 

Now, Tony’s clean energy was fueling very little fires. From what Bruce knew, it was just one – the tower. Maybe that was why Tony never seemed to leave for days or weeks at a time to visit another one of his locations. Maybe all others – and there were several others – had been overrun some time ago. Bruce pressed Betty’s number into his dead phone. He didn’t know, one way or the other. There weren’t news reels in this future.

 

Bruce thought about Steve, his fellow lab rat, and grimaced. If only the outcome of their world reflected him. Steve Rogers was infused with the C-serum, two classes after the original A-serum that Bruce’s bloodstream was connected to. He’d been in human trials for a long time after escaping General Ross. Bruce didn’t want to be used for experimentation. He loathed being looked at as abiotic; useful like a beaker, or a solution. But after Harlem, he had very few options. Not only that, but Bruce was dealing with a conscience that wouldn’t quit. His green problem was under control (but only barely), and he felt absolutely terrible for all the damage he’d wrought.

 

He’d had to make up for that.

 

So, at the behest of Obadiah Stane himself, Bruce entered into the A-project. It was named the A-project in order to avoid giving anything away, and Bruce had to admit, it worked like a charm. For almost a year, the physicist had no idea what he was being injected with. His monitors never opened their mouths to tell him. Even Steve, kind Steve, had very little information on the specifics of A-serum. His serum, C-serum, was being funded and doled out by a different organization. It was called SHIELD, and it was the clear winner in respect to humanity.

 

Steve would regale Bruce about the kindness of the staff, the specifics of his treatment, the effects and the results. They allowed Steve the dignity of transparency, and they’d signed an ironclad, legally-binding clause with him to protect his wellbeing above any sort of result (although Steve said SHIELD was confident enough in their serum that it never came down to health). Bruce received a different treatment.

 

He’d signed something that, through very carefully constructed legalese, hung Bruce out to dry. The serum could be extracted or injected at any time, and he worked on their schedule, not the other way around. He would sometimes be at STANE facilities for days at a time, but they never told him that. The operators of his experiment would simply say he’d fallen asleep, and then send him out when they no longer needed him.

 

Bruce would figure out on his own how much time had passed. In the beginning, he felt afraid for it. He wondered why the HULK never had any opinion on being imprisoned, but after the third time it happened, Bruce got wise. They were somehow suppressing his cellular reactions – effectively taking the punch out of his green counterpart. He would shift color, but never mass or temperament. Bruce was made inert.

 

The question that rested on Bruce’s mind most of the time was – why keep going? Where was the benefit? To put it simply, for him, there was none. Bruce had grown used to the sick cycle, and the numbing pain, and the unusual after-effects of A-serum. He was reminded time and time again that until the serum and the experiment entire came to some sort of fruition, he was likely not escaping Stane, nor his trials or his team. They’d vetted Bruce. They’d specified the serum to react specifically to his body’s chemistry. In short, STANE couldn’t build from the ground up without him.

 

However, when their cellular suppressants began having a smaller and smaller effect on the HULK – nothing could keep him down for long – Stane started to realize that he was losing his grip on the collar he’d wrapped around Bruce’s neck.

 

For this very reason, the B-serum was formulated. Bruce knew little to nothing about B-serum for a long time, all too excited to be free of STANE and of their unorthodox procedures. He would have felt guilt for leaving another man behind, but subject B was much different than either Steve or himself. Named Brock Rumlow, subject B was nothing short of a full-tilt maniac. His eyes seemed to gleam each time he’d exited STANE facilities, and whenever Bruce ran into him, Rumlow would grab hard onto his shirtfront and congratulate them both on ‘getting it done for the right reasons.’ Bruce never knew what that meant. Not until the world started turning upside down.

 

Bruce wouldn’t find himself inside of a human trial unless it was dire, unless the world needed it from him. And the way STANE presented their case, that was how it seemed. Humankind in general were positively minute in comparison to their Asgardian counterparts. STANE continued along this thoughtful line by mentioning that nobody would have been able to handle the battle of New York if not for the Avengers, and that the very same went for Washington DC, Sokovia, and so forth. The human body needed an upgrade. Although Bruce couldn’t dispute this, he knew that something about the trial was off the second after he signed up.

 

He wasn’t allowed anywhere near the chemistry, and he knew that behind subjects A, B, and C, there were hundreds of men and women that simply didn’t make the cut. They were either too weak or their side effects too severe to perform under the added pressure of being a main subject. This was all kept very much under wraps by STANE facilities, but they couldn’t continue to do away with their failures for long.

 

Hence, World War 3. Steve and Bruce got out alive, but Rumlow didn’t. He was patient zero, the first ever recorded zombie. Having been infected by an unknown, undocumented sufferer that was supposed to be euthanized the day everything changed, the disease spread through him fast. A genetic mutation that was meant to better mankind had the exact opposite effect… and down civilization fell. Not with the crash and burn of an alien invasion, but through internal mutiny.

 

Bruce had no idea what happened to Steve. Being that C-serum was the ultimate cure for ‘humanity’s weakness’, he must have been alive today. He wasn’t impervious to the zombie virus in the same way Bruce was, what with his particular strain of serum being wholly disconnected from STANE’s, but his immune system alone would have been enough to keep them off of his trail.

 

 _Seven-oh-six, five-five-five, seventy-two eighty-three._ Bruce typed it in again and again. He waited for the familiar bloom of red and gold in the sky, and he tried his hardest not to smell the rot that lingered around him.

 

In no small part, this was his fault. And for that reason, Bruce would remain sitting by the park bench, messing with his dead phone. He had no other reason to _be_ , and he very well couldn’t die.

 

**“Hey, doc. This grass used to be a lot greener. Might want to get up.”**

 

Bruce's head slowly rose. So the bot wasn’t empty, after all. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They talk.

Bruce turned around, damned. He couldn’t leave this situation, nor could he pause it and pretend it wasn’t happening. Tony Stark was in his suit, it was sparking, and they two were the only living human beings on the entire street. With the dead watching them, encroaching on them, Bruce began to feel a slight sense of awareness. He’d been alone for such a long time, and now he had to answer for himself. How did he look? Was there mania in his eyes, or despair? How patchy was the hair that grew on his face?

 

It didn’t matter, but at the same time, it couldn’t have mattered more. Bruce wanted out. Off the streets, away from the violence and the decay. He’d seen too much. It was all beginning to blend, the sickness; Bruce was sure he matched the iron cage New York settled into, but god how he wanted to contrast.

 

His phone sat like lead in his pocket. For now, his old girlfriend’s number didn’t matter. He didn’t need to type it in and in and in and….

 

“Hey, pal. You’re alive, right? J said you were, and he’s never really wrong.” Tony stepped closer as he said it, but halted seemingly out of nowhere.

 

It was Bruce’s face. He looked manic. He was sure of it.

 

A pause set them both into human silence, and then, “Listen, whether you’re alive or not, comatose, whatever, we got to go. I don’t know if you see what I’m seeing, but I brought a party with me, and they really want to dance.”

 

Bruce blinked. Zombies. Tony was the one bringing zombies. He must have done something to rile them, because it was true. More and more were filtering into the street, crowding them like fans at a concert.

 

“I need you to get up, Dr. Banner.” Tony continued. “Now.”

 

He wanted this. Bruce reminded himself of that. Tony was his salvation, and even if he was a hallucination, that was okay. Maybe Bruce would somehow get himself off the ground in the haze of belief, and when he fell, maybe he wouldn’t get back up. Bruce stood up. _Yeah_. He liked his odds.

 

“Let’s go.” Bruce said, at last.

 

* * *

 

Toward Stark Tower they both flew.


End file.
